Footprints in the Ozarks Read online

  Footprints

  in the Ozarks

  a memoir

  Ellen Gray Massey

  N A S H V I L L E, T E N N E S S E E

  Goldminds Publishing, LLC

  1050 Glenbrook Way, Suite 480

  Hendersonville, TN 37075

  Footprints in the Ozarks: A Memoir

  Copyright © Ellen Gray Massey, 2012.

  Drawings © Pauline Manning Batchelder

  Cover photos provided by Ellen Gray Massey.

  Printed in the United States of America. Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. www.goldmindspub.com

  Foreword

  On April 22, 1946 I drove my 1941 Ford coupe southwest through the Ozarks on U.S. 66 to my new job as Laclede County Home Agent in Lebanon, Missouri. In spite of the traffic on the two lane highway, I enjoyed driving through the woods where the fading redbud was giving way to white dogwood blossoms. I slowed as I crossed the creeks and small rivers to catch a glimpse of the clear waters bubbling over boulders as they cut crooked valleys through the hills. Late that afternoon as the sun was setting ahead of me, I turned right onto Millcreek Road, the business route of the small town. I slowed down as I passed under the arched sign spanning the street that read:

  LEBANON

  OUR TOWN YOUR TOWN

  6,000 FRIENDLY PEOPLE

  Over sixty years later, though Route 66 is now Interstate 44 and a half mile away, the sign is no longer there, and the population has more than doubled, I'm still here.

  I fell in love with the area and its people. I found what I was looking for and through my job, my marriage and years on the farm, teaching, and writing I have entrenched myself in the Ozark area and culture. Some people say I'm even an authority. I don't know about that, but I live in the Ozarks. I have married, farmed, and raised three children in the county. I have taught Ozark culture at all levels from first grade through university graduate classes. I have given many talks on the subject, taught seminars and Elderhostel classes, and have written much about it.

  Why I became interested in the Ozarks and have made the area my home and the focus of my work probably began with my background.

  I often wonder how I could have been so fortunate in my background and family. Not only did I have wonderful parents who believed each of their eight children could do whatever they wanted, but they gave us the wherewithal and the freedom to do it. They exposed us to two almost opposite ways of life when the United States was leaving its rural self-sufficiency way of life for the city. I experienced both rural and urban living at the same time.

  I was born in southwest Missouri in Vernon County where my parents had a 480 acre wheat farm. I was well entrenched in the rural life there. On the death of my parents in the 1960s my siblings and I formed the farm into a family corporation where my younger sister Carolyn and some of her family still live.

  Because of his work with Missouri Farm Bureau, my father, Chester H. Gray, became the Washington Representative when the American Farm Bureau was organized. In 1926 my family moved to Washington, D.C. where I attended school from kindergarten through college at Maryland University in College Park, just a twelve-mile drive from our home. However, we spent every summer back on our Missouri farm harvesting the wheat and preparing the land for the next crop.

  I belonged in both places. I was friends with kids in the farm community, going to square dances, visiting at their one-room school and attending the non-denominational community church. In Washington I was friends with families in the established community of American University Park. I went to school with senators' children. Through his work on Capitol Hill and the White House my father was on a first name basis with presidents and other governmental officials.

  When they grew up, my older brothers and sisters stayed in the east, working in traditional urban occupations such as college professor, trade association work, dietician, librarian, magazine editor and writer, and aeronautics engineer. Why didn't I follow their example? Why did I return permanently to the rural farming area of Missouri--specifically, why to the poorer, much belittled area known as the Ozarks?

  Romantic? Maybe. I studied the Romantic poets of England as part of my college major in English. Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley all romanticized the rural people. I agreed with them. I especially liked Wordsworth's poem “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways.” She was lovely. She was worthy, but no one else knew about her. So Wordsworth wrote the poem. Though we don't know her name, over 200 years later we know about her. That's what I felt about my farm friends. I wanted to be like Wordsworth and let the world see their value. To stop looking down on them. Though I didn't express it then, I wanted to be a writer. Why not? My brother was a writer on the National Geographic Magazine staff. My parents believed I could do whatever I wanted to do. I could do it.

  I admired farm people. I admired their intelligence and skill. I liked working outside with animals and growing things. In the mid 1940s college graduates didn't return to the farm. They went places, did things. They did not, as I did, bury themselves on a Midwestern farm--certainly not an OZARK farm.

  At the university I took a course in short story writing. Not poetry. I could never be a poet. But stories? Sure. I loved writing stories. My rural characters were admirable. They overcame their problems. I thought the stories were good. My professor didn't. I received the lowest grades I got in college from that course. At the end of the course the professor said that I needed to get more experience.

  She didn't discourage me. It was a challenge. So, okay, I reasoned, if I needed to get more experience, I'd get it. I'd return permanently to Missouri and farm life. I'd have lots of experiences. I didn't realize at the time that my professor meant some other experience--not farm experience. She didn't say I couldn't write. I realize now that it was my subject matter that she didn't like. I wrote stories about my rural friends and farming in Missouri. No one in the sophisticated East during the 1940s wanted to read about farm life! The world had progressed beyond that. We were in the middle of World War II. Terrible and exciting things were happening all over the world. Write stories about something important, was what she meant. Archaic, bucolic tales weren't for the twentieth century. Wordsworth was dead long ago, and I wasn't a Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg, both of whom I admired greatly and heard give speeches at Maryland University. Hearing Sandburg sing folk songs fueled my interest in folklore.

  Since I never follow the crowd, I went rural. I believed that we shouldn't forget our past, especially the fine things there, like neighborliness, self-sufficiency, understanding nature, and many basic norms and practices that were being replaced in city living.

  So I returned permanently to southern Missouri, prepared myself to become a county home agent where I would work with the rural women and 4-H kids. I was sent to Laclede County Missouri, deep in the Ozarks.

  Come follow my footprints as one of the 6,000 friendly people in my little town and share with me the people, places, and things of the Ozarks as I experienced them, first in Lebanon, then on the farm fifteen miles south in the same county, and then back to Lebanon.

  Though this event took place before I was part of the area, I heard about it from Lane, his parents and sisters.

  FOUR HOURS OF CHRISTMAS

  Lane Massey wasn't listening as carefully as he should to the captain. He knew the routine. The usual instructions, implicit on preparations but vague on destination. In his twenty-
four months in the Army Air Force, he had heard six briefings such as this; he counted them as the captain was expounding the gravity of their mission. Lane knew the words by heart.

  But this one in December 1944 was for real. He knew from the differences in the faces and postures of the officers that his crew would be flown overseas to Europe or to the Pacific where the Allied forces were on the offensive. The gunners and his fellow mechanics sensed it. At all the other briefings, though they were on alert for a few days, ready at a minute's notice to jump into the plane, nothing had happened. The overseas order was rescinded as they continued their work of training new mechanics, gunners, and pilots at Hobbs Air Force Base in New Mexico.

  Lane wasn't listening carefully for a number of reasons. It was late afternoon Christmas Eve. This time they were on a few hours hold in Missouri, only 160 miles or a six-hour bus ride from his home. This would be the third Christmas away from his family. During the captain's instructions, Lane pictured his white-haired father alone feeding their partnership Angus herd. Right about now his mother would be gathering the eggs. His sisters were probably milking the cows, including old Ann, his prize Jersey he didn't sell when he was drafted. He smiled as he remembered Hazel's last letter describing how persistently old Ann's calf bawled when she was weaned.

  On this clear, chilly evening, even though the impersonal hangar in the Kansas City Municipal Airport by the muddy Missouri River did not resemble his Ozark farm on the Osage Fork River, Lane could feel Missouri in the air. He sensed the nearness of his spring-fed stream, the protection of the wooded bluff behind the farm buildings, and the contentment of the farm animals as they ate their grain.

  “Any questions?”

  Lane shook away his thoughts to tune in his captain's voice. “That's it for now. This mission is top secret. Enjoy your rest, for you won't get much after takeoff. Report back here tomorrow at fourteen hundred hours. Dismissed.”

  As Lane walked by him, the captain asked, “Sergeant, aren't you from Missouri?”

  “Yes, sir. From the Ozarks.”

  “Harder on you than the others, being so close to home, especially at Christmas,” he said, studying Lane's expression. “Going to give your family a call?”

  “They don't have a telephone.”

  “Too bad.” The captain smiled for the first time this evening. “Well, merry Christmas.”

  “Thank you, sir. The same to you.”

  Lane's buddy, Jim, joined him. “They mean business this time,” he said, tossing his duffle bag over his shoulder.

  “Yeah, make no mistake about that,” Lane said but he was thinking, Fourteen hundred hours--two o'clock tomorrow afternoon--is eighteen hours away!

  By the time the men reached their hotel room, Lane had decided to go. Just enough time. Since he hadn't been home in two years, it was worth the risk. He set out his shaving equipment, messed up the bed, and changed from his flight clothes into his dress uniform.

  “I'll be back tomorrow in time, Jim,” he said to the astonished airman.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Probably,” Lane said. “But we're not restricted to quarters and I still have my pass.” He checked in his wallet to make sure he had money before putting it carefully into his back pocket. His eager smile lighting up his round face, his hands held up to show Jim that he wasn't carrying any baggage, he disappeared into the hallway.

  He hurried under the browned-out street lights to the bus station. In spite of wartime restrictions of no colored Christmas lights, the city displayed a festive air--evergreens twined around light poles and shop windows decorated with tinsel and cotton snow.

  A bus labeled Springfield was about to pull out. Lane pounded on the door to alert the driver.

  “Sorry, soldier, no more seats,” the driver opened the door to tell Lane.

  “I'll stand,” Lane said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  Making his way down the aisle, Lane almost fell on a woman when the bus turned out of the depot. “Here, soldier,” she said in the soft dialect of the Ozarks, “you kin set here.” She picked up her toddler beside her and scooted over into the window seat.

  Gratefully, Lane fell into the seat. Although his long flight, the hours of readying the plane, and the lengthy instructions were taking their toll, he was exhilarated. He was speeding home in a bus with other people from his part of the state. It was almost Christmas!

  But, it took six more hours before he actually reached his family after changing buses in Springfield for Lebanon and then dragging his cousin out of bed to drive him the remaining seventeen miles to the farm. At four o'clock on Christmas morning he jumped out of the car and, by its lights, opened the gate to his father's farm.

  “Thanks, Jack,” Lane said, his eyes dancing in anticipation of seeing his family. “The folks will drive me back.”

  As Jack turned the car around, the headlights of his car highlighted the tall white house, then swept past the lawn fence, the well pump, and the henhouse beyond.

  The sharp warning barks of the pointers quickly changed to welcome as Lane bounded up the porch steps and fondled the dogs' long ears. “Dad, Mother, Hazel, Ethel!” he shouted, opening the unlocked door and flicking on the light in the cold living room. He stepped in the open door of his parents' bedroom.

  “Lands sakes, it's Lane!” his mother cried, joyful tears running down her face as she threw back the bed quilts. His dad was having trouble pulling on his overalls in his excitement and rush to greet his son. With robes hastily wrapped around them, his sisters raced down the stairs, too surprised to do more than enjoy the warmth of Lane's strong arms hugging them to his chest.

  Christmas began, not with the colorful presents piled in the corner, but with the happy faces and familiar voices of his family. The clean cedar scent of the decorated tree mingled with the familiar smells of home--the wood smoke that intensified as Dad shoved sticks of wood into the black stove, the lingering scent of last night's fried meat, and the hint of lye soap from the recent mopping of the linoleum in the living room.

  In the rapidly warming room, Lane was surrounded by his family, grinning, hugging, laughing, and then exclaiming in dismay when they learned that he had only four hours before he had to start back.

  “Let's get dressed and fix Lane some breakfast,” Mother said, her work-rough hands caressing his.

  Lane took the stairs two at a time. The one light hanging on a cord from the ceiling illuminated his room--just as he had left it, only neater. No time now to look over his treasures, his hunting rifles or his favorite fishing reel. Instead, he threw off his dress jacket and pulled on his flannel shirt, overalls and comfortable work shoes. Outside he would refuel his being with all the old familiar sights--the barn, the bottom fields, the river, the herd, and even the hogs up in the bluff pasture.

  No longer a United States Army Air Force sergeant, but a farmer savoring every picture on the wall and piece of furniture, he walked slowly through the house to the kitchen, where already there was a fire burning in the cook stove and the coffee pot heating. Dressed for the morning chores, Dad and the girls were awaiting him.

  They sat around the table enjoying being together and visiting--Lane telling how he happened to be here, the others telling him the news of the farm and the neighborhood. Ethel leaned against Lane, teasing him about his short, military haircut.

  Mother, just returning from the chicken house, held up a pullet by the legs. “The last fryer left from the batch the old hen hid out last fall.”

  Lane had been anticipating his mother's big breakfast, but didn't expect his favorite dish since young chickens were rarely available in the winter. Because it was too cold to dress it outside, Mother scalded and plucked the chicken while listening to the conversation through the open door of the closed-in porch. She singed it at the kitchen wood range by removing one of the stove lids and stoking up the fire to get a blaze. As Lane watched her clean and gut the chicken and cut it into pieces--legs, thighs, wings, breast, and
sides--he anticipated bragging to his buddies how on Christmas Day he feasted on farm-fresh fried chicken, fried potatoes, eggs, biscuits, and flour gravy.

  “I want to see everything,” Lane said, jumping up and grabbing his old denim jacket and wool cap still hanging on the hook by the door. “Let's do the chores.”

  “We can do them later,” Dad said.

  “No, I want to help do them.”

  Chuckling, Dad lit the lantern.

  Lane helped his sisters carry the milk utensils to the barn. Though it was early for milking, old Ann, as usual, was the first cow to step into the patch of light at the barn door. “She knows me,” Lane said, caressing her head. Ann responded by rubbing it against his leg.

  Lane started the strong streams of milk which sang against the sides of the pail like an orchestrated background for the animated voices of his sisters. It didn't matter that the lone electric bulb did little to light up the stanchions or that the lantern only cast shadows into the corner where he sat. This was where he wanted to be, doing chores with his family. The musty odor of hay filled the barn. The acrid smell of manure was diluted by the nippy air.

  Alerted by the lights and activity, the horses trotted to the barnyard fence and nickered for their feed. Handing his full milk bucket to Ethel, Lane stretched out his cramped fingers, amazed that his muscles were so soft. He used to milk six cows without his hands feeling this tired. He climbed the narrow stairs to the loft to throw hay to the horses.

  Lane had no trouble catching Lady. He hugged her head to his chest, speaking softly and stroking her coarse winter hair. But Redwings, her filly colt, a beautiful sorrel, would not come to him. She flitted around her mother, keeping her distance in the dim light.

  “She's a dandy,” Dad said. Crooning to her, he eased up to the colt and slipped a rope halter over her head. In the open doorway of the barn, the light glistened on her sorrel coat and mane. Dad trotted her in a circle to show off her grace and style.